Hiiiii It's Jillllllll

A few months since the release of Memento have passed, so I decided to write down a bunch of my general process as well some loose random thoughts I had along the way. Be warned, if you have not played Memento, this will contain spoilers for the whole game!

        So begins the Memento in Marrow post-mortem!

Before MiM, before I even really was making anything, I was in multiple situations that were continually burning me out that made it impossible for me to even think about making anything tangible. I was at a point in my life where I had this need to be doing Something Different than what I was doing. Even when my will to create art was reinvigorated immensely (big shoutouts to Blue Period. Seriously, if you are an artist or want to take a better look into art, read Blue Period. It's amazing how much that manga made me want to make art again), I would still struggle even thinking about making anything long-term. All I could think about was whatever was right in front of me and just trying to move forward as this constantly exhausted ball that just wanted to decompress after work.

Last year (that being 2022), I had moved ahead and done some things for myself that I really needed to do for myself. I went through several personal self-discovery arcs and I ended up doing a lot of reading and just experiencing more things on my own time.

I realized I had a bit of a visual novel backlog that I wanted to knock through, and I decided hey, I'm gonna read through these, these have been collecting dust for too long. So I ended up doing a Lot of reading.

It was around this time that I discovered that I Really Liked Visual Novels.

I mean, I feel like I always Liked visual novels, I'd played some here and there of course but I don't think I ever really appreciated them to the degree that I do now. I think my appreciation for them also increased when I realized how incredibly accessible they were to make with Ren'Py. I'd wanted to do Something with my art but I never really felt like what I liked doing/was able to do could fit into anything I had in mind, until I realized that VNs were an angle I could tackle.

Visual novels are a medium I've come to respect more and more, and the way of which they're able to dress a piece of writing with sights and sounds in ways that infinitely add to an experience (I mean, having a book with its own soundtrack is pretty sweet) was something that especially appealed to me.

I just kept reading, I kept reading things that would pull places within myself that hadn't been quite pulled on before. Heaven Will Be Mine and Coquette Dragoon were big ones that really touched places within me that I don't think I'd really had touched before. Signalis, while not a VN, was also something that very much affected me to a bewildering degree and had also filled me with creative fervor.

Something I think in particular that got me about some of this stuff is I realized how much I needed to read/play stuff about queer adults who Have been queer for a while, and how long I'd really been searching for queer media that touches that now aged and cultivated queer self, and what it means to exist as someone who's been like this for a while (I say this as if I'm like 40).

Thinking about all of this and getting filled with the desire to make something real and tangible, I decided to finally work on my own project.

This project was not MiM.

Starting in July of 2022, I was working on another visual novel.

This project I still want to make real; but I had my reasons for it not being my first completed project.

It was wayyyy bigger in scope than I felt I could have handled for my first project. It had multiple endings, it had somewhat branching dialogue, it had a comparatively larger cast of characters, it had side-scenes, I was just too excited. I had all of these ideas, and to be fair I'll definitely still tap into this stuff one day, but it was a lot to be thinking about for my first real writing romp.

See, my experience with writing was. Lacking! I did some really shitty creepypasta-esque short stories that were never more than a couple pages back in high school, and whatever else I had written were loosely-written analysis on media and smut. I think writing the smut made me better, but who's to say.

Then, after that, I began writing bits of poetry here and there. It was stuff that was very off the dome. I would write whatever came to the top of my head and didn't give it a second pass.

        A couple snippets of loose poetry.

    It was something I enjoyed doing, I liked being able to just let whatever feelings I had flow out into some tangible form. It was super freeing for me and really made me realize that I did enjoy writing after all, I just needed to think about it differently than I was before. It was the writing equivalent of opening up ms paint and not worrying about layers and using my mouse to doodle, I just let out whatever I was feeling into my word doc. I think that's what I needed to really push me to write more.

I channeled that into some of my earlier project creation; I would have a thought come across my mind, and I'd write something down for it. Over time I would piece together more and more things together and eventually I got a rough picture of what I wanted to do with everything.

However, things were not without their issues! One such problem that I realized a bit into writing structure, is that I feel it ended up being somewhat derivative. Sure while it had a good share of its differences, I felt ultimately it would have ended up as "different but still kind of worse version of so-and-so" were I to continue and try to finish that off as my first project. Whether or not that would have been true is still TBD, as we speak I haven't even so much as looked at the docs since Really starting work on MiM, and I'm also working on an entirely different project on top of that.

But I do intend to return to it eventually! I'm sure it'll be a bit of a weird venture though because I'd channeled a lot of my feelings of burnout and general frustration with the way that things were for the past couple years into it and it's going to be interesting going back and revisiting some of that as a future iteration of myself.

Regardless of what happens to that project, I don't see any of what I did with it to be a waste because it really helped me get practice and to help warm me up for writing MiM. I do love what I had going on in there, so I really don't see myself abandoning it entirely. Worst case scenario, I end up repurposing the cast. I haven't so much as even looked at any of that stuff since January at this point, though.

While I was working on that project, I'd occasionally have ideas for different projects, and I'd write those down somewhere as soon as they had them, so that I wouldn't lose them later.

It came to me suddenly at an extremely random time, and I initially thought it was too weird an idea at first. But then, I decided, fuck it! Fuck it all, I'm having a lot of feelings about it. There were a lot of things I was feeling at the time, and the idea itself was a culmination of a lot of different things that hit me all at once.

        This is what MiM started out as. The sentiment is a little different now, but for the most part it has the same flavors.

    It was an idea that came to me at a time when I was becoming a lot more in tune with myself. I felt myself growing, I felt more in touch with being queer than I ever had in my entire life, and through my queerness and this love of this queer self that I had finally been able to cultivate, I had these feelings of "I want this to be a part of me forever". I want to take this with me as long as I can. I've never felt more whole than to experience being queer like this, and it's so special and I consider myself so lucky that I'm like this.

I also wanted to be able to be remembered as I wished to be. I can't influence everybody, of course. I'm no god. But I had these feelings of wanting this queerness to be seen because of the fact it is so intrinsic to who I am, it's that important. So I thought; isn't engraving that onto your bones, the part of you that sticks around the longest, the strongest way to make it physically permanent with you?

And then I further thought about how, with time, with moments, with events, things happen, and then they can never un-happen. I thought about how that even though something might not have been done for a large audience, it still happened, and if it was something special to you, you carry that with you. That moment happened and even if it didn't last a long time in the grand scheme of things, it still happened, and nothing can erase that. Even if people misremember, the moment itself still remains true.

I would be upset if I knew people would misremember, but, ultimately, I know who I am, and I'm happy about that. Nobody can take that away from me.

I love being trans! I love being gay! Living this queer life despite whatever hardship I face is worth it and I feel so goddamn lucky to be able to experience it.

I quickly felt very strongly about the idea, and in the 1st week of January on a Thursday, I started writing.

This is funny to look at now bc I remember right after I typed out this paragraph and typed 'friend' I realized no. no this is Super gay. it was going to be Ultra gay. I think 'friend' lasted all of a day or two.

(Shoutouts to the google docs dark mode addon btw)

Starting out, I had a lot of energy to go at the writing for this. I would write these big chunks at a time and come the end of January, I had roughly 55 pages laid out. The final version (that I further worked on once I imported everything into Ren'Py) was 76 pages by March. Memento was the thing that was on my mind for that entire January, and honestly, it was the thing that was on my mind for the entirety of its development cycle. I was fervently thinking of ways I could improve literally every single aspect of it most days (and I had to do a lot to force myself to take breaks from thinking about it LOL).

I knew I wanted to write it, of course. It's my story. But then, I realized, hey. I actually kind of want to do the art for this too. Oh wait, I have photographs I could use for backgrounds. I kind of want to take some more pictures for the rest of the backgrounds, I could go out and hunt down some places to take pictures. Hmm... I've been getting into making music again, I want to try making the music for it. I kind of want to learn Ren'Py, I'm going to do that myself so I can make more stuff in the future. Before I knew it, I took on Every. Single. Part. Of the creative process. Everything.

Um. Don't ask me why I did that (or if I'm going to do it again. I might.).

One part about the development process that I think back to, is if I was feeling tired with working on one aspect, I would usually feel like I'd be able to bounce toward a different part of it. Working with a brain that's wired like mine really isn't easy, but the best way I was able to manage was to just work with it. I feel the times I operated the slowest were actually when there were only a few things left to do in the final couple weeks of development, when I couldn't do as much of that bouncing.
I certainly did the best I could trying to make everything, and I think I did an okay job considering my lack of expertise in most of the fields I was working with.

I wasn't ENTIRELY alone, of course. There was my friend Hadley, who offered to take a look at my 1st draft and helped shave down a lot of my sentences (an annoying quirk of my writing is that I tend to put more words than necessary into a sentence), and gave me some input that helped things meander less. If they didn't help out with that, the end result would have been much more rambly and more tiresome to read, and for that I am SUPER thankful. I also did have a small batch of playtesters who gave it another once-over a couple months later.

God, it was so scary sharing my writing with other people. When I was showing my writing to Hadley I expected to have my writing absolutely torn to shreds, I asked not for honeyed words and instead asked for my writing to be torn apart if need be.

And by the end, after pouring a chunk of time into suggesting edits and giving a handful of criticisms, they came back and told me I had something special and good on my hands.

I nearly cried! I nearly cried. Maybe I did? I think I might've. It felt like such a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, to be told that this weird idea of mine was something that seemed worthwhile was so nice to hear. It reinvigorated me to continue to work on my script, and to further polish it.

Up until this point, while I was progressing forth in earnest, I never felt a real sense of confidence in my writing, and I was afraid that was something that would show up in the text. I had a very masochistic way of looking at what I expected for feedback, I felt like I needed someone to tell me what I had was shit in order for me to get it together.

I continued on, and started working on sketching out visual design at the same time.

This was the first piece of mockup art that I made for MiM. Honestly, not a lot changed with the way she looked besides trying to figure out an outfit. I've always had trouble with dressing my characters, I feel. I wish I could channel my friend Brie, who just seems to have this incredible knack for that. I swear I turn around for two seconds and she makes like three crazy good characters. This BG wasn't used, but I'd still love to use it someday. The White Mountains are absolutely gorgeous. I miss taking trips out to rural Maine. Looking at this makes me want to go outside, jump into a tree, and then get bitten by bugs.

At this stage, I learned I would have to make compromises, otherwise this project was never going to be released. The most important thing that I told myself about this project was that it had to be completed, and I was determined to get it done.

After going through and finishing this project, I'd really internalized the mindset of 'just get it done', which I think is something a lot of people should try to internalize if they want to make something. Of course you don't have to finish *everything*, sometimes there are battles not worth fighting for. But I do think it's good to finish things even if you think they're kind of shitty, because then as you make more stuff it just gets better.

I think a lot of the drawings I tend to do nowadays are mostly things that I finish in a single sitting, otherwise I'm never able to finish them. But that also could just be me. I like doing those single-sitting drawings because I know I'm finishing something, and I can proceed with the lessons I learned from that piece and move onto the next.

Getting back to MiM stuff. Starting out, I had wanted to make all of the lines for the art traditionally. Given that I would have to be scanning things in and I'd have to make sure everything was to-scale and that there would inevitably be faces that wouldn't look good what put onto the head, I decided it was going to be an incredible workload less to do everything digitally. I do miss the scratchy look that my lines had in this stage, it's something I haven't quite been able to quite replicate digitally just yet.

I also do kinda miss how the UI looked here, it's obviously not perfect but I liked its flavor. I ended up not making a custom UI in the end because the ideas I had obscured Yori's chair a bit too much to my liking.

Thelma was practically one-and-done, the only real things that weren't defined from the get-go were her tattoos and tank top logo. I did give her a more confident stance and general demeanor, whereas before she was a bit more stoner-y.

Speaking of stoner-y, I almost shared this sketch as the first piece of promotional art on 4/21 (I had My Reasons why I couldn't make this on 4/20) and as funny as I thought it'd be, I ended up not going for it. Cowardice.

When writing the characters themselves, I had ideas for who I wanted them to be in my head but I never wrote out any sort of bios or character history. I had concepts and ideas, and mostly ended up conveying things as I let my writing define them. I'd just get a feeling like "yeah, I feel like that's something Thelma had goin on" and then I'd put it in and it usually felt right in the end.

Sometimes characters would just end up in certain ways without me entirely meaning to, which is pretty neat! It's cool to have characters naturally evolve into something before my eyes, and usually before I even realize it.

Music-making was something that was almost entirely new to me when I was going through and imagining the soundtrack. The real MVP I have to say is Izotope Trash which is I think my favorite plugin ever. It gives all of my samples and instruments sooooooo much more range than they previously had, and it's so cool to tweak and mess with the presets until I got an overwhelming noise that had just the right flavor of overwhelming.

Most of me making the soundtrack came down to thinking about abstract feelings, and trying to construct an ambience that matched those abstracts. I think I was able to achieve this for the most part, really a lot of the process for me was picking instruments and distorting them to hell with Trash until I got a sound that felt Right. So, really, it was just a lot of T and E.

These were a few of my inspos that helped my brain conjure the types of sounds I wanted to try to make.

After 5 months of work, I was finally done. My first Real thing that I had ever made, put out into the world. Long had I made things quietly and existed within the crevices, now I was making something honest and personal and real and I was baring it before the world. It was the scariest and most elating thing I had ever done in my entire life.

And I'm so glad that I did it.

As of writing this, MiM has just reached 100 downloads??? which is much more than I ever would have expected??????? For me to even imagine my funny little game being on a hundred computers is absurd, but more than that, I've had people give me incredibly heartfelt responses that have made it all feel like it's been worth it. To hear that something I made connected with someone is really special to hear. I never would have expected any of the responses that I've gotten in response to this game, but for anyone that has said anything, thank you!

I've had people tell me they've cried while reading this, which is something I never expected to hear about my writing. It's not a bad thing at all! I guess I just chronically sell myself short, I think.

With everything said, I'm so glad that I decided to bare myself emotionally nude before an audience in the way I have.

I want to keep making things until I'm dead.

As we speak I'm already writing my next VN (tentatively titled 'Womb of Wire'), so lately I've been mostly in the headspace of WoW rather than that of MiM. But, even though my mind is currently elsewhere at the moment, I still see these incredibly incredibly kind words that people have to share and it makes me so incredibly happy that people have connected with Memento. I'm very glad to have made this game and shared it with you all! Your kind words keep me going and remind me that it's worth it for me to make weird stuff.

My advice to anyone who has a creative idea is to just let that shit rock. Make selfish art, too. I feel it's really easy to compromise and to take out things you want to convey and replace them with something easier to swallow with some sort of external expectation, but the best stuff I feel comes from an honest and naked place. So get out there and streak! Write some dead dove, draw vore, include a 15-minute long scene that goes over the entire history of cereal mascot design, just say fuck it!

Anyways, what did y'all think about Memento? didyouloveitdidyouhateitwhatwouldyourateityourethebestyourethebest

One last thing, if anybody has any questions, let me know and I'll do my best to answer!

Toodles, and wish me luck!

- Jill <3